Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything.

Gertrude Stein

EMMA HAMMARÉN (SE)

JOEL HURLBURT (US/SE)

JANI RUSCICA (FIN)

HARTMUT STOCKTER (D)

What we see is never the entire picture.
The continuous passage of time makes unintelligible the composition of present events. While looking back gives a more informed perspective on the past, it smothers the ambiguities embedded in each moment. We are always in the present, which we ourselves obscure.
This exhibition brings together four artists of different nationalities and backgrounds. The connection between their practices is not so much in content as in the way it is processed. The point of departure may be a desire for knowledge or progress, but through their process there is an attention to the present moment. The artists approach the world with curiosity, doing so from the only perspective at hand, the subjective. The constant change in time becomes a material and a part of their work.

In Emma Hammarén's work something has been happening, we were not present at its start, but things have progressed, been generating and degenerating, seemingly at once. The work originates in the personal, but through time transcends into a realm of shared experience/history. At Studio 44 she will show an installation constructed from the remnants of disassembled books. Images and fragments of text are taken out of context and arranged anew. One order is given over to another.

Emma studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, before returning to Stockholm, where she has continued to live and work.

Joel Hurlburt sides with using everything. Any material or object has the potential to find a place in his work. His tunnels and passages take many forms, as they reach from one plain into another. In his installation “Trouble in the stairway, trouble in the hall”, mundane items and uncanny objects occupy a common space, where the handrail leads only to itself, and the hall carpet comes to a confounding end.

Joel is from the US and moved to Stockholm after studying Fine Arts at Massachusetts College of Art, in Boston, and Literature at Hartwick College, in New York State.

Jani Ruscica's video work "Evolutions” draws out individual beginnings from a much broader narrative. The seven scenes in the film, the seven stories about worldviews and the universe, have been created together with a group of teenagers who share a passion for theatre. The stage for each scene is set up in a film studio, a temporary surface of projection for each person´s worldview. The line that comes out of the darkness is a beginning, but not the beginning. "This version starts here" the girl says, another begins somewhere else.

Jani lives and works in Helsinki, and studied at the Finnish Art Academy in Helsinki, as well as Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.

Hartmut Stockter's inventions, in their attempt to aid viewing the natural world instead get in the way (as is the case with so much technology). They are handmade devices, apparently assembled from metal, wood and plastic materials in the workshop of an inventive craftsman, but practicality and functionality are clearly not prioritised. An apparatus that carries a painting in front of one’s face helps to preserve a more desirable image of the world. The frame holds the known and created world up to the ever-changing and never-matching beyond.

Hartmut Lives and works in Copenhagen. His studies have taken him to Norway, Germany and Greenland.